bigglesfandomcom-20200215-history
José O'Higgins
In Biggles and the Little Green God, José O'Higgins was one of the key players in the complicated plot. Unlike the other two, Don Carlos Ricardo Pallimo and Professor Barrendo, O'Higgins never appeared in person and Biggles never met him. According to Pallimo, José O'Higgins was a direct descendant of Bernardo O'Higgins, the commander of the Chilean Army who liberated Chile from Spanish rule. Bernardo later moved to Peru but some of his family returned to Chile. Like Pallimo and Barrendo, José O'Higgins had a deep interest in history and archaeology and also collected local antiquities. He had also done some important archaeological work, having deciphered inscriptions on ancient monuments and also having put one Indian language into writing by composing its alphabet. O'Higgins' involvement with the story began when he was asked by Pallimo to courier a parcel containing the statue of the ancient pre-Inca God Atu-hua from London to Santiago. O'Higgins was, according to Pallimo, someone whom he trusted implicitly. After the aircraft, a chartered Caravana disappeared, Biggles was asked to investigate the insurance claim Pallimo made for the loss of his statue. Biggles found the crashed aircraft and also two surviving members of the crew. From one of them, the navigator Pepe, Biggles learnt the astonishing fact that O'Higgins did not actually go down with the plane. He had stepped off, claiming illness, at El Lobitos, just before the aircraft was due to ascend and cross the Andes. What's more, O'Higgins had asked Pepe to take a parcel for him to Santiago. He seemed anxious that the parcel should go and told Pepe it was only a clock. Pepe suspected that it was actually the firing mechanism for a bomb which brought the plane down. More complications entered this already murky picture when Biggles met Estiban Huerta, a local expert on Indian affairs whom Pallimo had employed to work among the Indian tribes, dispelling rumours that their God Atu-hua was going to return, essentially keeping the peace and nipping any moves towards insurrection in the bud. Huerta told Biggles that there was only one man who knew about the Indians as much as he did and that was O'Higgins. He had a "bee in the bonnet" about the original inhabitants of the country and was always collecting objects connected with their old religions. Huerta implied that O'Higgins might well be the man who was spreading rumours about the return of Atu-hua. Finally, Huerta told Biggles that the statue O'Higgins was carrying in the Caravana was actually a fake. These rather disparate facts allowed Biggles to make some tentative sense of the convoluted picture. Biggles surmised that far from trusting him, Pallimo probably suspected O'Higgins had his own political ambitions and wanted the statue for himself. His asking O'Higgins to carry the statue was by way of a trap or ruse. If O'Higgins should steal the statue for political ends, Pallimo could discredit him by producing the real one. However Pallimo's plan backfired when O'Higgins discovered during the flight that the statue was a fake. O'Higgins decided to get his own back at Pallimo. He left the aircraft at El Lobitos but planted a bomb on board to cause it to crash. Algy and Biggles both found O'Higgins' motives for this a bit difficult to fathom. Perhaps in doing so, he could prevent Pallimo ever using the real statue. Since the statue would be believed lost in the crash, Pallimo could not produce the real one without revealing his duplicity. In any case, Biggles did not try to tidy up every loose end in this complicated affair. He never sought to meet O'Higgins or even bothered to find out if, for example, he was the one who had sent the anonymous warning note to Biggles, or if he had hired the gunmen to shoot at Biggles outside Barrendo's house. Biggles even left the matter of the aircraft bomb hanging, never bringing up the suspicions of O'Higgins to the authorities. Biggles limited himself to his brief of investigating and scorching Pallimo's fraudulent insurance claim. The complexities of South American politics was something which, as he told Algy, he did not try to understand, and with that the reader also has to be content. Category:People Category:Biggles characters Category:Air Police era characters